Very solid, thoughtful game that puts various efforts to fix the budget into perspective: note how little getting rid of earmarks actually saves us. Seems like there should be more options on the table, including repealing Obama’s health care plan for the crazies, especially since many of these proposals have just about as much chance of happening, but still a nice dose of reality, and a example of how the internet can change how we learn and talk about these kind of political issues. It’s like the amazing stuff leading up to the last two elections from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight, playing and interacting with the maps really helps you to visualize and understand what’s important and interesting in a way that just reading can’t.
Big Love Season One
Me and Caree have been watching this. Caree had seen it before (but only the first season). It’s good. The standouts are Jeanne Tripplehorn as Barb, and especially Chloe Sevigny as Nikki. Nikki starts out as one of the most annoying characters on television, but through sheer force of will Chloe Sevigny makes us like her, so much so that things tend to be a lot less interesting when she or Barb aren’t around (Sevigny is also the source of most of the humor in the series).
Which leads us to the biggest problem of the series: Bill Paxton is seriously out-matched as an actor. This was kind of surprising to me, since he always seemed solid, and was the only one of the core four I could have recognized before watching this show. But he’s boring as toast compared to the wives, even though his storyline (about his confrontation with the prophet Roman Grant) has the most inherent interest and strongest through-line.
A similar problem shows up in the next generation, where daughter Sarah is considerably more compelling than son Ben. I’ve also heard this show gets soapier as it goes on, which seems like an obvious pitfall. Right the show is so grounded, and so genuinely interested in how these people live their lives and love their families, but it could easily spin out of control if we lose that in favor of “drama.”
But for the first season at least, I’m going with a Recommended.
Caree gives it 3 stars out of five, slightly downgraded from her original assessment on this re-watch.
The Hangover
Watched this the other day. It was solid, but kind of forgettable. So much of cinematic comedy is so dreadful these days, that when something comes along that is at least fitfully amusing and not embarassingly bad it’s easy to overrate it (for instance, the work of Apatow and friends, and Anchorman, and Tropic Thunder, none of which are bad, but none of which are The Jerk or Monty Python, either). So Galifianakis is great, and Ed Helms is pretty good (though overshadowed by Galifianakis). But not much of it was laugh-out-loud, and a lot of it was pretty comedy-by-numbers.
But at least it’s not Friedberg and Seltzer, right?
There’s some all-time great comedy on television right now, but I don’t think I’ve seen a comedy movie that I’d add to the canon in quite a while. Maybe Borat, though I’ve only watched it twice and I fear it won’t have much replay value. Anyway, this I give a Good, But.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
So I finally got around to watching the most recent Harry Potter film. As far as the previous films go, my favorite is still the third which was stylish, fun and inventive, but I thought the fifth film was also pretty outstanding, elevating one of my least favorite books in the series. 1 and 2 were middling kiddie fare, and 4 was solid, but not particularly distinguished as a film. And Half-Blood Prince strikes me as being at about four’s level.
Visually, it’s pretty stunning. But the pacing is slow and the mood is mopey. The acting is all pretty strong, except maybe Rupert Grint who tends to play the comedy a little too broadly, and Bonnie Wright who plays Ginny either as Hermione, Jr. or a blank slate with no identifiable personality. Emma Watson, the standout from the core three in earlier films, is saddled with a subplot that sees her crying for most of the film’s running time and very little opportunity to be awesome. The kid playing Draco stepped up his game considerably, though, and the girl playing Luna livens up the whole show whenever she’s on-screen. All the teachers do outstanding work, particularly Jim Broadbent (who was the perfect Slughorn), Alan Rickman (kind of “no shit, sherlock,” but this is his best outing in this series), and Richard Harris, who still isn’t funny enough to be Dumbledore but owns this movie anyway. Unfortunately, Neville and Hagrid are basically cameos in this movie (and I’ve been really disappointed with how under-used Neville has been in all these movies, especially 5, because I think it’s gonna undermine his crowning moment of awesome in the finale.)
But there was little to no joy in this movie. Order of the Phoenix at least had “Fred and George quit school,” but the closest this movie came to fun was “Dumbledore cleans up Slughorn’s house” which is not really a fair trade. As I recall, the fun in this book mostly came from the liquid luck chapter, but that was a pretty sedate non-event in the movie. I also have to quibble with some of the music choices, which often seemed intrusive with their attempts to telegraph the mood of a given scene. This isn’t something that usually bothers me (hell, I love Lost and it did this all the time), but somehow it seemed to throw this movie out of balance, maybe because it would switch music within a scene if it wanted to change the mood, which is this close to playing the sound of a record scratch and having the main character (or a dog) do a double take. The main theme is still great though, and no denying it.
All in all, I give it a Good, But. I’m looking forward to the final two, anyhow. I’ll update with Caree’s thoughts and ratings when I talk about it with her tomorrow.
The Shop Around the Corner
I’ve decided to start keeping track of what me and Caree watch. Today we watched The Shop Around the Corner.
It was Caree’s first time watching this. She gave it 4 out of 5 stars.
It was, I don’t know, maybe my 4th time seeing it. I’d give it a Top-Notch. Lubitsch was the goddamn master. He doesn’t underline his jokes, just trusts the audience to keep up, and can actually write dialogue that plays on multiple levels without winking at us about how clever he is. Unlike a certain Nora Ephron I could name (though she’s not that bad, really, compared to, um, almost anyone else doing romantic comedies these days.)
According to the DVD, this came out the same year (1940) as The Philadelphia Story, so it was pretty much a hell of a year for Jimmy Stewart, too.
THIS SONG AND VIDEO IS TOTALLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR CHILDREN OR THE INSUFFICIENTLY AWESOME. It is, however, incredible. It got me listening to all the tracks that have been leaked from Cee-Lo’s upcoming album, and let me tell you, it is the shit. For real.
